Showing results 1 - 10 of 609
| Lawrence H. Summers
May 26, 2022, Video: "He is one of the most noted economists in the world and has been a key advisor to the previous two Democratic presidents. Join Washington Post Live to hear former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers’ assessment of the U.S. economy and the Biden administration’s efforts to control inflation."…
| David Deming
2022, Paper: "This paper synthesizes what economists have learned about human capital since Becker (1962) into four stylized facts. First, human capital explains at least one-third of the variation in labor earnings within countries and at least half of the variation across countries. Second, human capital investments have high economic returns throughout childhood and young adulthood. Third, we know how to build foundational skills such as…
| Vincent Pons
June 14, 2022, Paper: "A large literature documents the positive effects of experiments aiming to alleviate the informational and behavioural challenges jobseekers face. In contrast, this column evaluates the impact of an online platform for jobseekers in France and finds no impact on time spent looking for a job, search scope, or self-reported wellbeing. The results also show no effect on any employment outcome in the short or medium run.…
| Karen Dynan | Willie Powell
June 3, 2022, Opinion: "The US employment report for May confirmed that the demand for workers cooled somewhat this spring but remains strong. Nonfarm payrolls rose 390,000, a bit more than the consensus forecast, and the revisions to earlier months were small. As can be seen in figure 1, the May data bring the 3-month average growth rate of employment down to 408,000—down about one-third since the winter. The unemployment rate was unchanged at…
| Lawrence Katz
May 9, 2022, Video: "In this interview, I talk with distinguished labor economist, Larry Katz. Larry Katz is a pillar in economics as longtime editor of the top journal in economics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is also a professor of economics at Harvard University where he has written seminal works in labor economics on topics like inequality and education. We discuss his time as editor at the QJE and its influence, as well as what…
| Daniel Schneider
The Company Wage Tracker: Estimates of Wages at 66 Large Service Sector Employers - Daniel Schneider
April 2022, Paper: "Low wages are widespread in the service-sector – a sector that makes up nearly 20% of the nation’s workforce. While the COVID-19 crisis has focused public and policy attention on the service-sector, workers in retail, food service, big box stores, pharmacy, hardware, delivery, grocery and other subsectors continue to labor under precarious working conditions. Workers struggle with a lack of paid sick leave, unstable and…
| William Kerr
April 28, 2022, Video: "Friday, April 29, 2022 2:00pm-3:20pm (ET), Panel Session 5 – From Skills to Jobs: Panelists: Stefano Scarpetta, Director for Employment, Labour, and Social Affairs at the OECD; William (Bill) R. Kerr, D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Bill is the Unit Head of Entrepreneurial…
| Justin de Benedictis-Kessner
April 25, 2022, Paper: "Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. Using the policy of new housing production, we measure the effectiveness of financial compensation in winning policy support. We build a novel survey that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical…
| Sandra J. Sucher
April 21, 2022, Video: "Professor Sandra Sucher joins Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Brian Kenny to discuss the importance of people's trust in government, business, and institutions. They consider why leaders need to understand the origins of trust and why they need to build the question of trust into their decision-making. Professor Sucher also offers suggestions for leaders on what they can do to regain lost trust."
Non-HKS…
| Letian Zhang
April 13, 2022, Paper: "Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact…